Anita Howe, PhD

Dr. Anita Howe, PhD, is the Scientific Leader for Hepatitis C at the British Columbia Center for Excellence for HIV/AIDS. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Howe was the Hepatitis C Franchise Lead for Basic Research at Merck where she led the Clinical Virology team to study antiviral resistance for boceprevir, vaniprevir, grazoprevir, elbasvir among other drug candidates.

Dr. Howe received her PhD degree in Medical Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Alberta, Canada where she studied nucleoside inhibitors against hepatitis B. After her post-doctoral fellowship at the Harvard Medical School, she worked at the Schering-Plough Research Institute (now Merck) as a senior scientist where she led a discovery project to identify small molecule inhibitors against the hepatitis C virus (HCV) helicase. In 1999, she joined Wyeth Research (now Pfizer) as a Group Leader/Director where she initiated HCV research in collaboration with an alliance partner. During her tenure at Wyeth Research, she and her team advanced several molecules from drug discovery to clinical development. In addition to overseeing the HCV projects, Dr. Howe was also appointed Director in Translational Medicine where she set up a protein biomarker laboratory with mass-spectrometry-based platforms.

In 2008, Dr. Howe moved to Belgium where she joined Tibotec (Janssen Pharmaceuticals) as Director, Early Development where she provided strategic integration between Research and Development and Global Strategic Marketing.